OPTIMAL SLOPE OF A SOLAR COLLECTOR USING PARTICLE SWARM OPTIMIZATION ALGORITHM

Abstract

In Serbia, it is customary to use electricity for domestic hot water heating. As around 70% of electricity is produced by using coal with high greenhouse emission, it is beneficial to environment to use solar energy for domestic water heating. In addition it is important to have the highest possible efficiency of this use that may be obtained for the solar collector placed at its optimal slope. To find the optimum slope, EnergyPlus software is used for modeling solar plant, Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm (PSO) and operation of these two software codes is connected by using Genopt optimization software. This paper reports that the descrepancied in the incident solar radiation (of the solar distribution models) with the applied calculation timestep are multiplied by the applied software when the final results are obtained such as the optimal slope, solar fraction of the installation and electrical energy used in the installation. The appled solar distribution models does not influence to the calculation.